


Dead Boys

by Evandar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Consent Issues, Descriptions of Underage Sex, M/M, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2015-07-07
Packaged: 2018-04-08 04:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4290672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Potter reminds Barty too much of his old lover. He’s not a good enough man to be able to resist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Boys

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a pinch hit for HP Rare Fest 2015

For a moment, when Potter banks sharply to the left, missing a gout of flame by a whisker, Barty doesn’t see the boy who crippled his Lord. Contrary to Snape’s sneers (and everyone else’s fawning adulation), it’s not James Potter’s ghost that replaces him either. It’s not the first time. One day soon, there will be a last; he will wave Potter into a maze from which he will never return, and the shade that hovers around him will be exorcised.

Once upon a time, what feels like a lifetime ago, he watched another boy with messy black hair ride a broom like his life depended on it. That boy had been in green and silver; had been slower, but just as quick and nimble. The Potter boy shares his long hands and his straight nose as well as the hair. They even have the same build and the same, sly-cruel smile that starts in the left corner of the mouth before spreading only to disappear too soon. Occasionally, like now, they’re identical from a distance and every time he sees it, Barty’s heart begins to stutter.

He wonders, sometimes, if anyone else has noticed just how much Saint Potter up there resembles the Blacks. How much he resembles Regulus.

The blood relation is there, but it’s as tenuous as Barty’s own – a grandmother on the father’s side – but everyone seems to have forgotten that. Heaven forbid anyone point out Potter’s startling resemblance to the most notorious Dark family in Britain, even if it _was_ common knowledge in Barty’s school days that James Potter took for his mother rather than his father.

He can still remember how Regulus cringed when he heard the rumour that Sirius had managed to pass for James Potter’s brother on a jaunt into Muggle London. He can still remember the way his hands shook as he hid them in his sleeves, and the neutral, uncaring mask he’d worn for the rest of the week as whispers spread. He’d held his head high and faked uncaring, but his mask had slipped in private. Regulus’ rage and grief had been a study in beauty, and sometimes – through the fog Dementors and the Imperius have left in their wake – Barty can still remember the heat of Regulus’ body pressed against his own. He can remember hot breath and tears on his cheek and the first, desperate kisses they’d shared as Regulus wept for a brother lost.

Potter dives. The dragon roars and brings up its tail to swipe. It connects, and even from a distance, Barty’s stolen eye catches sight of the spray of blood from Potter’s shoulder and the pain that flickers across his face before he hides it away. 

They wince the same way, Regulus and Potter. They have the same mask. They both let their friends do the talking, preferring to observe from the shadows than rush into things headlong…unless it involves the Dark Lord, it seems. He can remember the whispered doubts Regulus shared when he thought Barty was sleeping. He never said a word about them and he wonders if he had, if Regulus would be alive or if they would both be long dead. He suspects his Lord knows, despite his silence, but he doesn’t have the courage to ask how – exactly – his sweet Regulus died. If their Lord killed him swiftly in a flash of green or tortured him first; if Regulus’ dreams of dead hands and drowning ever came true or if a poison had been his fate.

He tries not to think of it. Just like he tries not to think of what Regulus would have thought of the boy-child who conquered their Lord. When those thoughts do slip in, he thinks Regulus would have likes him. Such thoughts, of course, are treason and he tries to banish them as soon as they occur. He cannot afford his Lord to find them. He cannot lose focus now.

But the figure on the broom blurs as it always seems to. The golden egg becomes a snitch, and the bleeding shoulder transforms into broken ribs that were never _quite_ recovered from. The triumphant smile is the same – brief and beautiful and, for a precious moment – aimed directly at him once again.

The Dark Lord has taken his lover from him once before. Soon, soon, he will take him again.

But in the meantime, Barty will have his Regulus again. In a different body with different tastes. Potter is more physical than Regulus’ innate, inbred fragility ever allowed. He’s more needy, desperate in a way that Regulus never allowed himself to be. It is just as well. All of Barty’s tenderness was given to a boy long slain; the boy he takes to his bed now (on his desk, more often, at the front of his classroom) is there for pleasure and revenge and for the things Barty once had.

Potter, of course, thinks he is Moody. He doesn’t know enough to know that Alastor Moody would have died before tying a young lad to his headboard and fucking him from behind. No one, it seems, cares enough to _tell_ Potter these things. _“Make sure he lives,”_ Dumbledore told him at the start of the year; repeated it again after Halloween and the first, successful step in his Lord’s plan. Make the boy live – good luck with _that_ \- but keep him uninformed. Keep him ignorant.

Not keep him safe. Not keep him a wide-eyed virgin. Not make sure he knows enough to make it through the Tournament on his own two feet.

Not, come to think of it, give him any sort of education at all. 

Potter dodges another blast of flame as he spirals into the sky, his golden egg tucked under his arm. He circles in the sky, searching out a place to land, and – in a moment that Regulus would have been proud of (and that Barty quite is, actually, though he’ll never let it show) – he chooses to dismount behind the dragon keepers.

The stands erupt with cheers and screams, and Barty lets himself smile ever so slightly. Regulus, with his dreams and his fears of drowning, had never enjoyed sex in the water. Potter, on the other hand, he thinks he could convince into fucking in the bath – golden egg in attendance, of course.

Regulus looks up at him from the field, and despite his injury, looks radiant.


End file.
